A Month with Philip Whalen
Introduction:
Between 1980 and 1985, I studied with Philip Whalen during his more-or-less yearly appearances at Naropa Institute. During the last three years it was more of a general assistant than a student.
Later, Philip had triple-bypass heart surgery and, complicating his life even more, he was also not only legally blind (due to a screw-up on his cataract medicine at the hospital) but Sensei of the Hartford Street Zen Center and AIDS hospice. When I heard about his situation, I got this wild idea to write him a letter and offer my services as an assistant during his convalescence. To my amazement, I received a call the next week from his assistant who wanted to take some time off. After some discussion on the phone, we decided I would come out for a month and take care of Philip in the afternoons. What I wanted was to be able to stay at the San Francisco Zen Center and receive instruction while I was there. There was also some money in it for me.
And so in 1993, I flew to San Francisco to "take care of" Philip Whalen. My duties were minimal. The main thing was to get Philip up and moving-his doctor insisted this was the best thing following his surgery. So we usually walked to the bank with a stop on the way back for groceries, and sometimes we’d also stop at the dry cleaners or the post office. Once we stopped at an art gallery. Philip had asked them to frame (very expensively) a Tibetan painting in gold. But he couldn't see, so he needed me to tell him if his precise instructions on how it should be framed had been followed. And then we went home and put it in a spare room that was piled high with paintings and boxes and papers and books.
Once we were looking for an important check that he’d misplaced, and I discovered an immense pile of letters and packages on his desk. Many of the names were familiar to me from my days at Naropa: Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder, Nanao Sakaki, Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Leslie Scalapino, and Anne Waldman. All of them hadn’t been opened, and several were mailed months before. "You ever open these?" "Not unless I have to." One day I asked him what he could see (he could sign a check, for instance, if I put my finger on where the line began) and at this point he could see only shapes and colors, no details whatsoever.
But the situation at Philip's was so intense, and my stay at the San Francisco Zen Center so uncomfortable that I left the Zen Center after two days (without telling Philip) and rented a room on the edge of the Tenderloin and walked back and forth to Philip's Castro District zendo every day (about a 90-minute walk, each way).
An introvert by nature, I immediately became even more reclusive than usual and rarely left my hotel room except to walk to Philip's every day. One of my few extra-curricular visits was to Nancy Peters at City Lights, and it was my first time in City Lights Bookstore. When I went upstairs, Ferlinghetti was sitting at his desk with his back to the door, talking on the phone.
And at night I read my way through Allen Ginsberg's Collected Poems. Harper and Row were putting together a selected and I was asked to help with the selection. In order to work with him every day, I had to forget about what a good poet he was. Plus I'd seen him read so many times that it was no longer special for me. But to read these poems consisting of intense (and almost neurotically precise) details sensitized some kind of inward seeing in me that made walking through S.F. almost impossible. A walk after dark through the Tenderloin was something of a modern Inferno-open flames, dark smoke, hungry strangers leaning out of dark alleys, garish neon and noise, poolcues splintering, distant gunshots, glaring women in short skirts on street corners-a subculture that took over the streets at night and retreated mostly to the city's cracks and shadows at dawn.
And then to carry these same eyes into Philip's room each day, and to deal with aging and illness and quiet failure and impending death. Or to read aloud to him from the “Diamond Sutra” or Ulysses or Lewis Carroll in the simple temple of his room. And then at night to return home and discover (somewhat for the first time) "Kaddish" or "The Fall of America," until I fell asleep on the crummy hotel mattress that I couldn't really afford. It was just too much of everything all at once.
So I ended up leaving a little early, abandoning Philip in a way. But when I visited him several years later, he seemed sincerely happy to see me … but with Philip I could never really tell.
A MONTH WITH PHILIP WHALEN
4th August, 1993: Room is very nice [at the San Francisco Zen Center] . . . but I feel out of place & awkward & missed zazen this morning because I never heard the bell or people stirring. [Later, at the Hartford Street Zen Center] my first sight of Philip was of him sitting in his chair in black robes with a brown wooden mala and staring at a tiny radio on the other side of the room where a radio was tuned to a classical music station. After a long chat about our past encounters (he pretended to remember me, but I could tell that he didn’t) and Allen [Ginsberg’s] current health and situation, we went to the bank and shopping. He is nearly blind, walks with a cane & is very slow - a little overweight: "The doctor says I should walk more and eat less." I pestered him about literature. He's never been to Florence or Ireland, but has been to Rome. We talked about Faulkner (a current favorite of mine; he has read everything and went to the bookshelf outside his room and found the books by touch, taking each out in turn, fingering the spines and telling me when he read each and what part of the story they told), Yeats (he was particularly interested in my description of the numerous Neolithic burial sites on the way to the Isle of Innisfree and what a tiny island it is in the far corner of a large lake three hours on foot from Sligo, and the unremarkable [Sligo] harbor that Pound mentions in the Cantos . . . also the sheer size of Coole Park and how the lake there is miles long, a surprise to both of us), Joyce (we argued about who was who in Molly's soliloquy, so I got it out and read the last four pages aloud and by the time I was through I was uncertain about who was who and so was Philip-he'd convinced me that he was right, and I'd convinced him that he was wrong), Blake, Pynchon, Fowles (he's only read one page of Fowles), Herodotus, Plato, Dante, Anselm Hollo, Kerouac, and maybe others. Heard gunshots out my window at night.
6th August: Missed a.m. zen sitting & feel very guilty about it & awkward . . . . I'm not eating meals here yet; hiding more or less in my room, some sitting in the dayroom, self-conscious and small. Tonight at 4 p.m. will help in the kitchen and need to check with Jerome about bathroom duties but where to find him? Yesterday I said to Philip "I hate group-think" and he said "I hate groups too!" and I said, "But now you're the head of one!" and he said, "Yeah, I know!" In the supermarket, leaning over the cantaloupes, teaching me how to tell if they're ripe by smell, said "I keep forgetting I'm sick and that's a problem." And I said, "Which? Being sick or forgetting about it?" and he said "Both!" When I stopped laughing I said, "Well, like Allen said, 'Don't grow old!'" And he looked thoughtful for a moment and then said very quietly, turning away, "Right."
7th August: Today I walked down Market Street and back through financial district looking for Moloch but all I saw were businessmen & women who looked grim and hurried, reading the "Wall Street Journal" and walking uphill. Mentioned my journey to Philip and he said, "No, I could never find Moloch either. There's no evil in the financial district. It's much higher than even their skyscrapers. People are sad but never evil."
10th August: Philip got me talking about art today. I told him about how I fell in love with Gaugain's red only when I saw it in person, and how I could see that same red in Matisse, for instance, or how important it is to see Van Gogh's paintings in person, maybe more than all the rest, because you can put your nose against the canvas and see how his swirling intermixed oils create valleys and crevices of color that rise off the canvas into bright peaks and dark valleys, & how important Vermeer was for both of us, and Gregory [Corso] too, but neither of us could really articulate why. We also tried to remember the exact number of his paintings (it's ridiculously small, like 32 or something) but we couldn't, but we thought it was really important that we should be able to, and we couldn't understand that either.
11th August: Today Philip said "I keep forgetting that these people like Anselm and Allen are surrogate fathers for you whereas they're just friends and peers to me."
12th August: Philip scolded me today for being too timid, too placid, shy. "I shouldn't have to be taking care of you."
14th August: Philip feels his situation is worsening-the chest pain and shortness of breath are returning. But his step seemed livelier today & he actually seemed in better spirits.
18th August: Philip found out today that I'd left the Zen Center and have been living in a hotel. Tom at the Zen Center is a friend of his and called to find out how to find me because he wanted to return the money I’d paid in advance for a month’s lodging and instruction. Philip scolded me when I showed up saying I had behaved like a child and was disorganized so that I couldn’t really tell my side of he story.
21st August: When I asked a question about zen sitting today Philip insisted on taking me down to the basement zendo for a private session. Soon he was bowing and on his knees and turning in circles and I was begging him to stop. But he refused to stop even though I'm sure he knew how humiliated I felt and that I wouldn't remember a thing.
22nd August: Philip is tending an AIDS hospice in the other half of his building and it's my first contact with AIDS patients outside of the hospital. I bring them newspapers in the morning and feel strange and nervous in their rooms. The nurses are lax and friendly, very fond of Philip. In the main room there are many Buddhist magazines but nothing overtly literary.
23rd August: Philip has a refrigerator in his room and when he opens the door a mouse jumps in and scavenges for food, chewing holes in the plastic wrapping around the bread from which Philip makes his sandwiches. When I point this out he says "He doesn't eat much. Spoilage is more of a problem. How am I to tell when the lettuce has gone brown?" Whenever he offers me something to eat I politely decline. It's gotten to the point where he almost enjoys our little masquerade. We compare notes on the various restaurants in town. He tells me where the best burgers are, the best french fries, the best milkshakes.
26th August: Walking today we came across the name Don Allen spraypainted on the sidewalk. Philip loves to reminisce about Don and Gary [Snyder] and especially Lew Welch. His relationship with Allen is much more testy but difficult to know why.
27th August: Tried to convince Philip to come to Boulder next summer for Allen's festival but he got very upset and yelled, "I'm sick! I'm on medicine! I can't be away from my doctor! I can't deal with all these impositions! It's irresponsible to ask! How am I to get on a plane much less get to Boulder?" When I told him I'd fly out and assist him he got even angrier: "No! I love Allen but this is altogether too much!"
28th August: Today I pressed the writing issue. He's not, can't see. So I began offering alternatives-a large art pad, a tape recorder, a scribe. No, no, no. Can't be bothered-nothing left to say. Isn't there enough? Who'll read it anyway? Who cares? No one even interested in publishing him. Someone in New Mexico had been talking about publishing his dharma talks but he hadn't heard anything more about it. When I asked if his dharma talks were being taped he said they weren't. When I said they should be he argued that the dharma talks were in the moment-to take them out of the moment would make them worse than irrelevant, it would make them misleading. When I told him that truth was truth and would become truth in the moment whatever moment it was if it was really truth, but he shook me off, although I think he'd really be pleased if someone would make the effort.
29th August: Today during our walk a short lyric from Lewis Carroll came into his head and we spent the afternoon looking for it without luck. I felt stupid, unable to find it.
September 3rd: I was reading to Philip from a translation of the Diamond Sutra & there was a point where half the group had to leave the room before Buddha would agree to impart some advanced piece of wisdom on them, and the argument went on far too long for my taste-Oh Great Buddha please impart this great wisdom to us, your fondest students-Oh, no, I couldn't possibly, there are too many who would not understand-Oh no Great Buddha, please, pretty please. Um, well.... Oh, please! Great Buddha, please! Well, maybe if you get those lesser beings out of the room I'll think about it. So most of the room is shuffled off to wait outside before the Great Buddha drops his hidden wisdom and I got more and more upset until I finally stopped and said, "Why is it that in every religion there's always a group that's groovy and a larger group that's not groovy? Don't your sympathies immediately go with the ones who are thrown out? Don't you automatically want to be with them? Don't you want to flee from the smugness and pomposity and self-involved mistaken sense of superiority of those who would consider them above anyone else? Wouldn't a real Buddha leave the group to be with those cast out, as Jesus would have? And Philip got nervous and began talking very fast, "What's different is that those who left are just slower, they're not eternally damned like in Christianity."
September 5th: Today after a pleasant walk we returned to Philip's room and I said, "Do you want me to read to you?" And he said, "But what?" And I said, "Well, I was reading the Diamond Sutra, if I'm not butchering the Buddhist terms too badly." And he said, "I thought it made you nervous."
September 6th: Called Allen today to try to get some money to buy Philip a tape recorder but Allen got very angry-Philip has money. But he doesn't, I argued. We spent an entire week looking for a check that was supposed to cover their electricity-the Public Service Company was threatening to turn off the power if they weren't paid-hospice or no hospice. Philip has alienated every one of the previous benefactors and they've dropped out one by one-he's unsocial and has few friends. The S.F. Zen Center even sends him some money to keep him going. He feels like a failure.
September 7th: Today Philip and I argued. He was late and had been out to lunch with friends, came in congratulating himself on a great lunch of prime rib, french fries, and gravy. All of my irritation suddenly boiled over and I began scolding him, saying he should take better care of himself-think of his students, think of everyone who loves him. "Nobody loves me!" he shouted, standing above me. "I'm old. All I've ever done is complain!" "Well, how do you think I feel? I flew a thousand miles for this. This is costing me plenty. I took a month's vacation from work. I'm living in a ratty hotel room at $60.00 a night and walking 45 minutes every morning to come and take care of you. This is my life. How do you think I feel? What do you think I'm doing here if I don't love you? Do you think Anne and Allen and Gary don't love you?" We were yelling at each other, our faces a foot away, both of us exasperated.
September 8th: When I showed up today Philip was already dressed and ready to go for a walk. First, we stopped at the supermarket. He went directly to the vegetables, then the fruits, then asked me to find him some Pam. I found him some and told him the choices - one was butter-flavored. No butter, he said, No butter for me. "No," I told him, "it's imitation butter-flavor I'm sure. It's Pam, it's for people who can't have butter. But it has some of the taste I imagine." No, I better not, he said, just give me the non-butter variety. We filled three shopping bags with groceries. Then we took a brisk walk in the foothills. He was jovial, pointed into the hills where Don Allen lived, paused for a photograph in front of his zendo.
September 9th: Today I brought a copy of some newly published poems of Kerouac in a literary journal that praise Whalen and I came into his room very excited saying, "Hey, I've got some great news - here's some poems of Kerouac about how great you are." "No, don't read them to me! I don't want to hear them!" I couldn't believe it. I said, "What? What do you mean, you probably haven't heard these, they've just been published. You loved Kerouac and these are love poems to you. How can you possibly not want to hear them?" "No! There's no point to it. I don't want to look back, I don't want to remember the past. Those days are over and best forgotten. Kerouac's dead. Let him rest in peace. And let me rest in peace as well."